Final Project Video — Three Pigs of the Apocalypse
Final Project Reflection
Collaborating with Phil and Shaurya on this project, our group decided to based our video of the story of The Three Little Pigs. However, we wanted to retell the story through a slightly more metaphorical approach, and thus thought of connecting three themes (social, environmental, and technical issues/impacts) that have always existed in our society to the three different houses in our video. We ended up presenting these three different houses/environments using long drawn dolly shots due to the fact that we hope this long and slow gradual motion can indirectly infer how these issues/impacts on society are all long term, and that they are fairly hard to change or solve as even with the passage of time.
During our in-class critique, we received feedback on how the entire piece can be seen as a warning and that there is a strong feeling of alienation and suspension from the space. The feeling of the lack of control makes it feel like people can’t intervene, which causes our piece to feel powerful. However, a classmate commented on how she somewhat disagrees with our message because in real life many people are trying to actively intervene in these various areas. I definitely agree with her comment, but I also feel that despite people have always been trying to intervene or attempt to improve or fix things, it is very hard to actually create large impacts or changes. Due to this, we wanted to present a dystopian image of the world with the end situation feeling somewhat similar to the beginning even after the long passage of time to show the sense of powerlessness.
About some of the specific elements in our scenes, a classmate commented on how he felt that the flickering circle/light at the center top of the environments is a little eye straining due to the face that we have too many elements that are all moving very gradually. Due to this reason, he felt that his eyes are a little confused on what to focus on. Reflecting on his feedback, I agree that some of the small movement or motions may cause people’s eyes to feel a little conflicting while watching our video, and thus simplifying a little or planning out and presenting the multiple movements in an order instead of having them happening simultaneouslly may be sometime we could try to further experiment with and revise. But on the other side, classmates felt that the overarching piano/instrumental audio successfully added to the dystopian emotion we wanted to present, and the short cuts in the three embedded videos on the screens works well with the long shot lines of the 3D modeled houses.
In summary, with our metaphorical interpertation and representation of the story of The Three Little Pigs, we hope that viewers can think back about everything that has been happening in our world and lives, and reflect on these different issues through putting the video into meaning. In our video, the wolf of the original story represents what is currently happening outside in the world, depicted through the three clips on the screens and effecting the pigs living inside. The multiple doors in our 3D house model are meant to symbolize the past choices which we decided to ignore. Even though the continuity of life is enabled by technology shown through the last house (as if the three little pigs are saves and living in the computers/servers), our overall message is still leaning towards the negative side with a dystopian view because we felt that the quality of life cannot be fully enjoyed if we are overwhelmed by technology. However, our video is fairly open to interpretation and we were also interested in hearing about what people feel and think after watching our video. I also really liked the idea of developing our video into a walking/interactable project while keeping its dystopian and distanced quality, and overall find the critique session very beneficial.
Stephanie's ITP Blog 